Why Health Care (and Reality) Will Defer the Republican Dream

Because only kids can go to fantasyland for Christmas — not conservative bullies pushing the falsehoods of a small-government agenda. No matter how much the GOP (and Lieberman) think they've won, here's why the votes will never be there.

This is a column about the politics of health care and how they reveal, in the radiant contrasts of a Day-Glo X ray, our national dysfunction. But first, a necessary digression:

Last week I was flying back from Copenhagen, still bleary with the jet lag I got flying over there and dazzled by the cat-wrangling complexity of getting 192 countries to agree on lunch — much less a global agreement that will cost billions in real money — when I caught up with the Wall Street Journal's recent review of Jean-Francois Revel's Last Exit to Utopia. This inspired a little flash of nostalgia. As a Cold War brat, the son of a man who spent his life fighting the good war against global communism, I grew up with a small library of Revel's great books: The Totalitarian Temptation, How Democracies Perish, Democracy Against Itself. Revel was the rare French intellectual who fought in the French Resistance and recognized (in stark contrast to leftists like Jean-Paul Sartre) that the same impulse animated Nazism and communism: the strange and almost mystical desire to throw out the rational mind and submit to groupthink, all in the quest for a perfect world.

But communism died twenty years ago, and the Journal kicked off its review with the claim that Revel's themes "continue to resonate today." So I skimmed down to see what the heck they were talking about. Turns out it was the "shared loathing, among radical leftists and radical Islamists, of the U.S. and Israel."

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Really? Noam Chomsky and Osama Bin Laden constitute a "tyranny" on the order of Mao and Stalin?

Then the WSJ quoted one of Revel's great lines.

Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not.

And suddenly Revel seemed very Revel-evant indeed — which brings us to the political fight of the year.

Famously, Republicans marches in lockstep opposition to health-care reform. Despite the forty-six million Americans who don't have health care and the vast suffering this causes — the epidemic of bankruptcies, the forty-five thousand unnecessary deaths each year, the trend lines that show health-care costs destroying the economy by the time you finish reading this sentence — conservatives have refused to negotiate or compromise or offer any realistic alternative.

Not only that, the GOP has resorted to scorched-earth parliamentary procedures to try to block any and all Democrats efforts to solve the problem. In the 1960s, as Paul Krugman pointed out yesterday, the use of filibusters to shut off debate "affected only 8% of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27%. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70%."

And even if they can get past the stalling techniques, the Senate needs a "supermajority" of sixty to pass the legislation — which brings us back to California, which also requires a "supermajority" to pass legislation, which is why that bankrupt state is now feeding like a flesh-crazed zombie on the corpse of its once-great educational system.

And what is it all for?

Small Government.

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That's the number-one item on the Republican "check list" of ten key policy positions. To wit:

1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama's "stimulus" bill.

This is the dream animating all those Tea Parties, which have become so popular that the Tea Party Party outpolled the Republican Party 23 percent to 18 percent (!) in a recent Rasmussen poll. It is the dream animating the fevered propagandists of Fox News, who have accused President Obama of "bowing at the altar of Socialism" (Sean Hannity) and "marching us to a non-violent Fascism" (Glenn Beck). It is the dream animating the California Republicans who have, since the "proposition 13" property tax revolt of 1978, managed to block all efforts at balancing the state budget.

But the conservative dream of small government with real reform is a total fantasy, as disconnected from the world we actually live in as heaven itself. As Jon Stewart said last week, it's like wanting "more sunshine without the heat and brightness."

This fantasy world doesn't mean Republicans are hypocrites who spend just as much as Democrats do, although they are — Ronald Reagan doubled the national debt and George W. Bush raised the budget from Clinton's $1.9 trillion to $3.1 trillion, — a $1.2 trillion increase that outpaces Obama's by more than double (his budget was $3.45 trillion) without the threat of a global economic collapse to justify it.

Domestic discretionary spending amounted to $485 billion last year. With a deficit last year of $459 billion, we would have had to abolish virtually every single domestic program to have achieved budget balance. That means every penny spent on housing, education, agriculture, highway construction and maintenance, border patrols, air traffic control, the FBI, and every other thing one can think of outside of national defense, Social Security and Medicare.

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And that's just holding the line. The only way to get to small government is by radical cuts in national defense, Social Security, or Medicare — and that's about as likely as flying back from Copenhagen in a carriage pulled by reindeer.

As Bartlett puts it:

There is no evidence that it is politically possible to cut spending enough to make more than a trivial difference in our nation's fiscal problems. The votes aren't there and never will be. Those who continue to insist otherwise are living in a dream world and deserve no attention from serious people.

Which takes us back to Revel:

Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not.

Next week: how "progressives" are exactly the same.

Meanwhile, here in the real world where American workers struggle to get decent jobs and "socialism" translates as sincere-if-imperfect efforts by democratically elected representatives to help them, I found this article from a blogger (and Esquire reader) who calls himself Labor Lou:

The effort to jump start high-speed rail projects across the continental U.S., for example, will have enormous impact over urban and suburban development patterns, energy use and, of course, intercity transportation.

The start-up $8 billion stimulus money is spurring state and regional action on land acquisition, engineering, contracting, and ultimately construction of these corridors. It will certainly be many years and decades before we see 220 mile-an-hour bullet trains connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco, Chicago to St. Louis, Houston to New Orleans, Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Miami to Tampa, but these labor intensive projects will provide tens of thousands of high-wage jobs.

Spearheading the plan is the U.S. Department of Transportation, led by its energetic Secretary Ray LaHood, who before his appointment by President Obama was a Republican member of Congress from Illinois for 14 years.

The DOT recently announced that more than 30 rail manufacturers and suppliers have agreed that if they're contracted to work on high-speed rail, they will operate out of U.S.-based production facilities. That means that the tracks, wires and station materials will be built right here in America....

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